The Barbershop

I do not know where the future will take us. I’m not going to try and escape the risks in modern society, but I’m also not going to ignore them. I’m going to be right here, in the thick of it, and that’s where I want to be.

Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower found solace in their dead son’s favorite color

The difference a pen pal can make

Theodore Roosevelt never recovered from the loss of his son in WWI

Surviving the holiday without our loved ones

Yet our little sister does not play the victim. She presses on, a sufferer who labors as best she can while shadows and thorns press in against her. And she prays to God like the woman persistent in her case when contending with an unjust judge; and since God is just, since He is the Good and Righteous Judge of All the Earth, our little sister’s hope remains “deeper still.”

Might our local faith communities support such cultivation of virtue, while also restoring what might again be a hub of parish social life?

I guess it’s time to sweep. Again. And then again. But we can embrace the gentler side of housekeeping. Besides, if you leave be those spiders in the corners, they might yet catch some other bugs for you, performing an essential service.

It’s not perhaps that the world doesn’t need change, but that as anti-Machine author Paul Kingsnorth put it in these pages, “the first work is changing yourself.” We have to live where we’re placed, and for Eve at the Meat and Malt, right now that means continuing to serve the guests who entreat her for sustenance, despite the intrusion of the impersonal into her hospitality.

I wish environmentalists would better understand that there are no mustache-twirling billionaires drilling and digging and burning oil just for the hell and the money of it. Like money, petroleum is a very effective way to get the things we all want at the best convenience. And those in the oil industry are simply happy to oblige us and profit by their labors.